A Sense of Place: Daniel Alarcón on His New Book, At Night We Walk in Circles

Daniel Alarcón says it took him roughly five years to write At Night We Walk in Circles (Riverhead)—it was in 2008 that his protagonist, a young actor named Nelson, walked onto the page and never left. Set in a Latin American country distinctly familiar to Alarcón’s native Peru (the writer was born in Lima but moved to the United States when he was a child), the novel tells the story of Nelson’s involvement with a revived tour of a politically contentious play called The Idiot President, written by one of Nelson’s heroes, Henry Nuñez. Nelson’s father has passed away; the woman he loves is living with another man; and his brother lives in the United States. So when the opportunity arrives for Nelson to travel the provinces to revive The Idiot President with Nuñez and his colleague Patalarga, he doesn’t hesitate. From there, the story of Nelson unfolds dramatically. Vogue.com caught up with Alarcón the other day.

The Idiot President was performed by a theater troupe named Diciembre. You’ve said elsewhere it’s based on a play by a friend of yours—is that true?It’s based on a play by a friend of mine named Walter Ventocia—he lives in New York. Though I haven’t talked in him in awhile. He was a founding member of a theater troupe called Septiembre. His experiences in Septiembre helped create my fictional Diciembre. We share a good friend, a man named Gustavo, and Gustavo and I traveled around the provinces in 1999 for about a month; he told me all kinds of stories about the plays that he had performed in the middle of nowhere. At the time, I had no idea it was going to be part of the novel. But yeah, in the fervor of the seventies and the eighties, that did happen—there was this tradition of people’s theater and street theater. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, but it’s very much like that, except in a more tumultuous context.

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Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Alarcon

It’s interesting that your novel is set in a country that is very similar to Peru though it’s never explicitly named. Why did you choose to do that?What’s funny—I didn’t even notice this until I saw the finished book—but Jon Lee Anderson blurbed my book and he wrote “a group of Peruvian actors,” even though the book never says it is Peru. I find it really interesting that no one noticed this—not me, not our copy editor, not the editorial team at Riverhead. It’s confusing enough to be interesting. He’s not wrong. Of course, it’s based on Peru. It’s not not Peru. It’s also easier to not focus on defining place exactly so that I can focus more on story and molding history as I needed it to be molded. In a way, that nagging sort of doubt about getting it right is averted.

But the idea of Peru is important to you?Oddly, by rejecting a defined place on the map with a set of borders, it frees you up to create a textured and deeply imagined world. I think place is very important in my work, even more so in my first novel Lost City Radio and War by Candlelight. When I wrote War By Candlelight, there was a guy at a reading I did who was Pakistani, and he said, “I’ve never been to Lima but it sounds like Karachi.” That statement gratified my decision to erase the geographical place, to not call it Lima. There are a lot of shared experiences in these urban centers. It’s not even just the global south, you see some Lima in L.A. and New York and Miami and Chicago. It’s there.

What does the title, At Night We Walk in Circles, mean?Literally, it refers to what the men do in the prison yard after dark. Figuratively, it comes from Guy Debord. I read his book The Society of the Spectacle and I felt it had a lot say about Nelson as an actor and as a member of the generation who interprets himself through mediated versions of art. At the end, he’s no longer able to see himself as himself. He only understands himself through the spectacle. That’s one of the points of Guy Debord’s book. The full quote from Debord is, “At night we walk in circles and are consumed by fire.” I liked the phrase so much, and I liked having a shout-out to Guy Debord, that I just kept it.

Your character Henry is arrested and accused of terrorism for his play. He spends a few harrowing months in a prison referred to as Collectors. Why did you decide to include this detail?I stumbled into an invitation to talk about my last book with prison inmates who were incarcerated for terrorism. I was thrilled to have that opportunity. It gave me such a unique perspective. I ended up working with a guy who helped me get into the prisons, including the large prison that Collectors is based on. And it really is that—it’s massive, it’s overcrowded, it’s dangerous and it’s self-governed; the inmates run the show. It is its own reality, you know? And I started spending a lot of time there talking to inmates. I taught a workshop there in 2009; I even spent the night inside for a piece I was writing for Harper’s. So it was an accident that it ended up in my novel—I hadn’t yet been inside the prison when I first starting writing this book. But the more I learned about a place like Collectors, the more I felt that I was able to imagine a world beyond what I could see. In other words, I couldn’t have written the book I started. I had to write another book and throw it out, and in the process I’ve learned so much more.